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At least 7,700 new oil wells are proposed for Santa Barbara County that will require approximately one gajillion mile-tons of heavy truck traffic. Measure M is a preemptive tactic to obligate the county to maintain all the public roads being chunked-up by private enterprise. If your fillings get rattled out of your head on the way to the casino, it’s not Santa Maria Energy’s fault; it’s the dang county fighting fires and other frivolous stuff instead of greasing the skids for Peter Adam’s campaign contributors. If the Cato Institute’s Lanny Ebenstein joins the progressive-er wing of the County Board of Supervisors in opposition to M (he did!), you know that it’s a bad ordinance.

If it just happens to eviscerate government by starving departments that serve people instead of dying industries, then that’s the kind of government an anti-government kind of government officeholder can get behind. Also please note that Peter Adam’s paid staff collected the signatures to get the ordinance qualified — your tax dollars at work.

I used to be against banning fracking but the more I learn the more I am considering voting to ban it even though people here know I am a huge supporter of free markets and producing our own energy at home so our troops don't go kill for it overseas.

The following DID NOT convince me to ban fracking:

The oil companies claim that not one single water supply in the country has ever been polluted by fracking. If you are somebody saying this, you need to stop, it is a lie and complete misinformation. All you have to do is watch Gasland 2 (and the first one if you want) and you will see that this is just an outright lie. I've read the debunking pieces for these films and let me tell you they are extremely weak and not comprehensive of the entire film.

The real question is HOW MUCH groundwater pollution has fracking caused, and would it be worth cleaning up or paying for those people's damages to continue to collect this enormous amount of energy we have stored? Unfortunately there is no good answer to this question that I'm aware of.

THIS is what caused me to consider banning fracking:

All of currently viable energy sources cause some pollution and that needs to be balanced with how much energy is being extracted. This can be measured by profitability as long as the companies producing the energy don't externalize their pollution (including government property they may be leasing). While that may not be happening in a completely fair manner now, I would try and fix that before banning the activity altogether.

So the film talks about how many hundreds of truck loads it takes to frack a well. If the industry is profitable enough, if it is extracting enough energy that more than makes up for the resources spent to get it then we are still in good shape.

So considering how much energy is used to frack a well the industry must be very profitable. Right? Right??

What I found may blow your mind..

Fracking could very well be the next bubble, sorta like the housing bubble but more like the internet stock bubble. Companies like Halliburton who supply fracking equipment are making a KILLING no matter what!! But what about the companies actually developing wells? Turns out these shell companies are being funded with junk bonds and may never be profitable!!

Junk Bonds Fuel the Shale Boom

"Any industry needs profits to survive. The oil shale boom is so far finding profits elusive even though production has greatly increased domestic oil production. Last year the industry (including drillers and suppliers) spent $60 billion more than they took in in revenues. How long can that be sustained- especially given that a fracking well starts to decline after only about a year in production? That also requires more and more wells being drilled just to maintain current productivity which costs more money. Lately it has been surviving on junk bonds."

spacey your problem is that you don't understand what economics even is. The fact that you think there is no connection between human need and economics is pretty ridiculous.

Corporations are not free market, they are government created anti-free market entities. I am against the idea of corporations even existing in the first place. What I am for is businesses that provide goods and services to people and I am not for restricting consensual economic activity.

What we need to do to increase the amount of goods and services available so that prices come down and poor people can afford them. Not at the cost of all of the environment, but humans will always destroy the environment to some extent and our goal should be to reduce that extent. To attempt to eliminate cold turkey is not realistic without the technology and knowledge of how exactly to do that.

If you actually studied economics, you would find that a lot of your political beliefs actually work against this goal and create more poverty. Big government welfare programs create more poverty, welfare should be done on an individual, voluntary or local level. Giving countries in Africa a big shipment of grains destroys their local grain markets, the grain producers go out of business and the next year you have even more people in those countries starving. What you need to do is help communities so that they can sustainably take care of themselves.

If you read my post carefully, you would have seen that I am against companies externalizing their pollution to other people or their resources. But IF fracking provided us with profitable and relatively clean energy that we could use to create more goods and services for poor people without externalizing the pollution, I would be for it because the alternative would be to use even less efficient and dirtier energy sources. The fact that the fracking industry may be a giant bubble means it may not be as clean and efficient as they claim as the equipment manufacturers like Halliburton make out like bandits. That is why I am hesitant to support it.

Having to resort to a voter initiative shows how badly the current board of supervisor majority has sold out to the county employee special interests.

They (Wolf, Carbajal, Farr) did not dare put this infrastructure priority allocation measure on the table themselves.

There is nothing wrong with the initiative process because nothing could be a clearer voice of the people. Don't forget the soft corruption of the board majority by the employee unions, they too benefit since if this passes some of their future union benefit decisions will be taken away from them.

Then, they get to have it both ways:

(1) still remain champions of the employee union interests (we tried to stop it, so you can keep sending us campaign money)

(2) now tell the unions their hands are tied because now county money rightfully goes to support county infrastructure and not just employee perks, benefits and more bloated pensions. (So sorry, but what can we do now?)

Even getting the large numbers of signatures to put this on the ballot is a message. If it does not win this time, it will in future elections.

The above comment shows how out of touch the writer is with reality and the sentiments of the greater community.Not my favorite board of reps as a whole, but far better than what Foo would put in place. Peter Adam was fairly elected, bless his heart. But he was only elected in his district and who knows what they really think.Your union obsession is becoming borderline medical emergency Foo.

KV now reduced to merely blathering personal attacks means only one thing: the points I make are gaining traction. Bingo.

The sentiments of the community have been shown by gathering the sufficient number of signatures - no small threshold. An the sentiments of the community will be officially recorded in the vote and precinct analysis after the fact.

I have a healthy respect for the employee union ground troops who get out the vote when they are most threatened, so I am putting no money on which way the final voice of the people will go on this issue.

But Adams has a darn good idea, and I wish him well.

Maybe not this time around, but we will sort out the county finances one way or another. Detroit is leading the way in public sector fiscal reform, and Stockton still has a few surprises to reveal which will also take the public temperature on these matters.

Thank you Mr. Paudler for demonstrating what is really behind mad man Peter Adam's deceptive campaign for Measure M. Under the "M is for Mayhem" thread I wrote about some contributors to Adam's quixotic effort: "Good old SME (Santa Maria Energy) has donated $10,000, CalPortland, a building materials company with operations in Solvang, recently gave $7,500." Hey, THEY WANT BETTER ROADS TO SHIP THEIR HEAVY PRODUCTS, and we would get to pay for them as we raid our safety/fire/police funding: wonder how much SME & CalPortland contributed directly to Adams's election campaign?? See this connection, and with the proposed 7,700 new oil wells?! What the frack! Luckily, John_Adams is right, and Mayhem Measure M is dead on arrival & will lose by at least 10 points... Yeah, and how is it that Adams's staff, paid with OUR TAX DOLLARS (hear that foo??), collected the signatures on County time for getting M on the ballot? -- ahh, your tax dollars at work! Conflict of interest??